Tim Gallagher
Författare till The Grail Bird: Hot on the Trail of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker
Om författaren
Tim Gallagher was working on The Grail Bird when he was among the first to sight the ivory-billed woodpecker in Arkansas, the so-called Grail Bird itself, long thought extinct. This led to a multimillion-dollar effort to confirm the sighting and protect the bird's dwindling habitat and changed the visa mer direction of his book, for which he won the Outdoor Writers Association of America's Best Book Award for 2005. Gallagher is the editor in chief of Living Bird and of the Journal of the North American Falconers' Association. visa färre
Foto taget av: Cornell Lab of Ornithology
Verk av Tim Gallagher
Born to Fish: How an Obsessed Angler Became the World's Greatest Striped Bass Fisherman (2018) 2 exemplar
Living Bird, Vol. 32/No. 3 1 exemplar
Species Profile: Great Horned Owl 1 exemplar
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Allmänna fakta
- Andra namn
- Gallgher, Timothy W.
- Födelsedag
- 1949
- Kön
- male
- Nationalitet
- USA
- Bostadsorter
- Ithaca, New York, USA
Medlemmar
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Statistik
- Verk
- 9
- Medlemmar
- 349
- Popularitet
- #68,500
- Betyg
- 3.8
- Recensioner
- 7
- ISBN
- 16
Paid $4.89 for used hardcover (no jacket) from Thriftbooks.com on 1/21/2022.
NOTE: Great review by Goodreads reader J.K. Grice
Month of March 2022 - Nature
The Grail Bird: Hot on the Trail of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker by Tim Gallagher (2005), 1st edition, hardcover (no jacket), 272 pages.
I happened to be in the right place, at the right time, on the right day, for 10 seconds on one hot summer day in 1979. I was 14 years old and living on Cow Bayou, in Southeast Texas, when I saw it fly and land on our neighbor’s cabin window…the largest woodpecker I had ever seen, with a black and white body and red on its head. As he admired himself through the mirrored window, I admired him while standing between two sweet gum trees.
Little did I know that would be the last time I’d ever see what I now know was most likely the “Good God”, pileated woodpecker, not actually the “Lord God”, ivory-billed woodpecker, since, according to this book, the ivory-billed woodpecker was nearly extinct, even back then in 1979, with only a handful sightings ever recorded since 1935. Even the pileated woodpecker has become a rare sighting around here. My mom last seen one land across the bayou, on an old dead cypress tree, about 3 years ago.
There has been only one recorded sighting of an ivory-billed woodpecker in Texas back in April 1966 in the Big Thicket National Preserve. It is interesting to note that, in October 1974, the 84,550-acre Big Thicket National Preserve was created due to that one sighting of the ivory-billed woodpecker in 1966 by John V. Dennis, even though it was not believed and the sighting renounced by Ornithologist Jim Tanner. (p. 21)
The search for the ivory-billed woodpecker was real and it was serious cut-throat business among the enthusiast birdwatchers and the Ornithologists out there. Without solid proof of sighting a rare bird, the credibility of their whole profession could hang in the balance. At the same time, if you spotted one, you kept it secret and tried to get the photos or the sound recordings yourself or risked someone else getting the credit, or worse case scenario, finding hundreds of birdwatchers flying in from all over the world to see this bird, destroying the habitat.
This list shows just how elusive the ivory-billed woodpecker really was:
1944 - a pair in the Singer Tract, Madison Parish, Louisiana
1950’s - east of Pensacola, Florida
1955 - a pair in Florida
1958 - one in Thomasville, Georgia
1971 - a pair in the Atchafalaya Swamp, west of Baton Rouge, Louisiana (polaroid photo shot by Fielding Lewis)
1975 - one crossing a highway in the Atchafalaya Swamp 20 miles west of Baton Rouge, Louisiana
1977-78 - a pair east of Catahoula, in the Atchafalaya Basin
1987 - Atchafalaya Basin by Fielding Lewis, guy who shot polaroid in 1971
1999 - Pearl River Wildlife Management area near Slidell, in southeastern Louisiana, an hour’s drive from new Orleans
2000 - one at Pearl River, Louisiana (Mary)
2000 - one at Three Rivers Wildlife Management Area, Louisiana (within a couple weeks of each other-same person, Mary)
2003 - Arkansas’s White River National Wildlife Refuge (Mary)
2004-2005 - one or possibly two ivory-billed woodpeckers sighted only a handful of times (about 7) very briefly flying here or there by teams of Ornithologists and bird watchers, including the author and his friend, Bobby, over a period of 2 years at Bayou de View in the Cache River National Park (eastern Arkansas)...still no photographs, no videos and no sound recordings, except for maybe a couple double drums that were inconclusive.
So, only 3 pictures of the ivory-billed woodpecker ever recorded in the whole wide world of this bird from the Singer Tract in 1935, Cuba in 1948 and a questionable polaroid snapshot from the Atchafalaya Basin in 1971? Only one 1935 sound recording and one 00:31 second video? (which are online, see below)
What is the status of the ivory-billed woodpecker today, seventeen years after this book has been published?
According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Southeast Region Louisiana Ecological Services Field Office Lafayette, Louisiana, Recovery Plan report dated April 16, 2010, the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker is considered “extinct”. There have been no sightings or signs anywhere in the U.S. since 2005; therefore, there can be no recovery plan.
https://ecos.fws.gov/docs/five_year_review/doc6021.pdf
Other books mentioned that might be worth looking into:
“Eskimo Year”
“Iceland Summer”
“Birds in the Wilderness”
(p. 10, all by George Miksch Sutton)
“Wild America” by Roger Tory Peterson
“Tales of a Louisiana Duck Hunter” by Lewis Fielding (a.k.a. Chief who lived in Atchafalaya Basin and who took the 1971 polaroid picture of the ivory-billed woodpecker. (p. 107)
“The Land of the Giants” by Greg Guirard…a Cajun author and photographer (on pgs. 136-139 in “The Grail Bird”, the author provides interesting info on the village of Bayou Chene and how the levees built in the 1930’s rerouted yearly flood waters into the village, forcing the people to desert the area. Today, homes lie under sediment washed in year after year after year. The only thing kept dug out and cared for is the village cemetery. He then makes it to Fausse Point, land of my Cajun ancestors. In summer of 2017, we made the drive around and about that levee and got road blocked a couple of times, just like the author claimed. We’d drive up some private road to the tops of the levee and drive the top for a while, then head down a dirt road to the bottom again and drive that a while. I didn’t know there were TRAILS! We drove to Lake Fausse Pointe State Park, but it was still closed down at that time due to what they called an “inland tropical depression”..not even a hurricane, from the summer before, in August 2016. It caused one of the highest recorded floods of all time for that area.
WEBSITES
All About Birds Website (Cornell Lab of Ornithology), link to hear a 1935 recording of the sound and a little short 00:31 second video, both provided by Arthur Allen, along with photos and facts about the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker:
https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Ivory-billed_Woodpecker/overview
Audubon website, Tim Gallagher’s blog of his search of the ivory-billed woodpecker in Cuba, link:
https://www.audubon.org/section/chasing-ivory-bill?page=1
Mary Scott’s, birdingamerica.com, is no longer a viable website. She now has the “Birdchick Blog”:
http://www.birdchick.com/
Mary gave up being a corporate lawyer and became a Web Designer so she can work from home or anywhere while she went ghost-bird chasing, looking for some of the most rare and potentially extinct birds, including the ivory-billed woodpecker.
NOTES ON THE IVORY-BILLED WOODPECKERS IN 2005
* Nomadic by nature, a “disaster species”, showing up in areas with a lot of recently killed trees.
* Holes are larger and more oval than ones created by the pileated woodpecker
* Large lateral grooves in the bark of trees, signs of the woodpecker trying to remove the bark to get to the insects behind, especially fond of the beetle larvae
* Woodpeckers are more active and vocal in spring and winter, and more visible because of trees being bare.
* Sightings were crossing I-10 somewhere along the 20-mile Atchafalaya Swamp Bridge between Baton Rouge and Lafayette...back in 2005
* Sightings in the Atchafalaya Basin NOTE: What you see today is nearly 100% 2nd growth. The basin had been pretty much clear-cut by the middle of the 20th century beginning right after the Civil War when “a lot of land and lumber companies in the North were practically given the land down here.” (per author Greg Guirard, p. 138).
* Believed to have thrived in “virgin” forests before clear-cutting became the norm
* About 6 square mile territory
PERSONAL NOTES
On page 143, the author writes, as he’s driving around the levees and back-roads of Louisiana: “I’d hate to get nailed for trespassing and have some police chief with a fifty-two-inch gun belt run my ass out of town or shoot me in the foot and leave me for dead.”
How funny! That is the stigma of Louisiana people, in general. My Uncle James used to say, “You never want to get stopped by those Louisiana policeman. They’ll have two or three stopped at one time and they want cash right then and there or they’ll haul your ass to jail.” And after his brother died (my Uncle Shelton), someone came and disassembled his covered parking and rode off with it, while everyone was away attending the funeral. Haha...how crazy! His death had been reported as an accidental death, even though he was extremely weak and riddled with severe osteoarthritis, when they found his heavy dresser on top of him. My Aunt Robbie told me that his Rolex watch and other gold pieces also went missing. That was back in 2002, so yes, that’s the stigma of Louisiana.
PHOTO TAKING TIP USING YOUR CELL PHONE & BINOCULARS
P. 169-70: Use a pocket size digital camera, hold it to the eyepiece of a spotting scope or binoculars…take a telephoto shot. WHAT? And he says he’s seen pictures good enough to publish in books or magazines. I’m sure this can be done on a Samsung, but definitely not the iPhone 12 Pro Max. The quality of my photos from my phone SUCK compared to my son’s Samsung cell phone. See the YouTube on exactly how to do this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=9KWB46buByA&feature=youtu.be… (mer)